


Command Me To Be Well

by solo (gay_wristwatch)



Series: Little Hell [1]
Category: The Wilds (TV 2020)
Genre: Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Other, Physical Abuse, Slurs, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:15:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29256549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gay_wristwatch/pseuds/solo
Summary: Dave Goodkind reflects on his own past, frightened for Shelby's future.
Relationships: Dave Goodkind/Original Male Character
Series: Little Hell [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2148363
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	Command Me To Be Well

**Author's Note:**

> please note the tags! this fic is from the POV of a homophobe and mentions Becca's death.
> 
> inspired partially by the film Giant Little Ones (2018), with a dash of Henry Gamble's Birthday Party (2015). both decent (but definitely flawed) gay movies.
> 
> anyway...

Dave's earliest memories related to this part of him are from such a young age he isn't even sure the memories are real. 

There's one that sticks out, on days that seem random to him; when he's helping Shelby open her gifts and she wants him to play with her new princess-themed cornucopia of toys. When he's half-listening to Melody and Spencer play, some part of him on guard for--he doesn't really want to admit what he's guarding against. 

The half-memory is the impression of his father, Jeffrey Goodkind, smacking his tender hands away from the handle of his cousin Amanda's pale pink doll stroller jumps into the forefront of his mind. He can't even remember the sting of the man's hands coming down on his--but he can remember the way he paused and broke into tears, but didn't run to his mother. He remembers his father yelling to her about him, about how he didn’t want her raising a little faggot, and how he insisted she keep a closer eye on what “that boy” (his son) was doing. And how innocently playing with a toy, an instance of his life that would have otherwise probably been lost like most of the other times he played with toys as a kid, became so momentous it's remained one of his earliest memories.

It's the first time he can really remember his father hitting him, remember the aftermath, remember how it made him feel. The day he really learned that girls' toys are not for boys to play with—and that he was _not_ to become, or act like, whatever a faggot was. His parents never gave him a little sister(or brother, for that matter), so it's not like he really had occasion to anyway. It became a non-issue.

That was his father’s main method for intervening in his life when he felt his son erring, with his vicious words and sometimes his clenched fists, too.

He'd never wanted to become his father, and he hasn’t—he’s done a good job of one thing, at least.

He hadn't lifted a hand to Spencer--or Melody–- once, over anything. He was careful not to raise his voice at his family.

He never drank.

He wanted the best for them. When he sees them doing something they shouldn't, he steps in; that's his job, he's their father, JoBeth's husband. The head of the household…but he takes care to keep his words and actions in check.

So when this thing comes up with Shelby, in his own house, he knows he has to step in and make things right. He would never leave some part of the house to sit and degrade and potentially hurt someone, so it's unconscionable to even consider letting Shelby make her first steps down such a slippery slope.

Dave knew what happened to people that chose a homosexual lifestyle; he'd seen it again and again, despite the way that society now seemed to have its arms wide open to those people.

His own words to Shelby were echoing in his head, now, sitting in his office with the doors locked. JoBeth had knocked a while ago to check on him but he told her he was praying...which had only been the case for a short while. Now, he was staring out of the french doors, blankly, feeling worry curl up in his chest.

The things his father did to keep him in line, to make him into a man...they weren't always right, but he felt like his father had the right ideas, just horribly wrong execution—especially when drinking (Jeff had been an on-the-wagon, off-the-wagon kind of drunk). Men should be masculine, which wasn’t a problem when Dave got older, though like many boys his mother had some embarrassing stories hidden away from his early youth. When he was older and mostly manly enough for his father, the man switched to poking fun at him for not drinking, for helping his mother in the kitchen, for wearing tights to track meets, and had cajoled the way he'd made the mistake of bursting into tears the first time they'd really gotten physical. Sometimes he wondered if Jeff had seen something errant in him before Dave knew it himself.

But Dave wasn't enough of a nimrod to perpetuate his father’s extremes when it came to gender. In a way, where Jeff had been wrong, he was still teaching Dave what not to do as a father and as a man. He made Dave learn what it really took to be a godly man by setting such a horrendous example. He was better than Jeff, which was why he included Melody in activities riding ATVs, why he cooked for the family sometimes, and why he invited Shelby out to hunt with him, despite his certainty that Jeff would have had something to say about all of that.

He almost laughed to himself, feeling somewhat dark in reaction to that last thought. Maybe he'd made a mistake with Shelby somewhere after all—though she really was quite a feminine girl overall. But as he looked at their life, he had no real idea if anything about their family life could have brought this on.

He'd been careful.

Listlessly, he got up and paced the short length of his office. He felt like he wanted to get back on the treadmill to work off some tension, but it was late and that would definitely worry JoBeth. Not to mention Shelby.

Somehow it was both a tangible fear he held, that one of his kids would struggle with same-sex attraction, and a prospect that seemed far from reality. He sometimes had a bit of a closer eye on Spencer when he was on playdates at the house, but he didn't really know what he was looking for that didn't include stereotypes. And what with Shelby and Rebecca, he knew more than ever that stereotypes were worthless when it came to this sort of thing. He didn't want to punish or hurt Spence over nothing, over his own embedded fears. Understandably, he'd kept a watchful eye over his son and was prone to projecting on him. But his daughters? Like a fool, it had slipped his mind that they could fall to the same feelings and temptations he’d started to brush with at their age.

Almost no-one knew but Jobeth and Jonathan and some of the guys in the SSA groups that he'd led over the years. He didn’t know what Jonathan was up to nowadays, though. They’d lost touch a long, long time ago—after Dave had set off for college—which had definitely been for the best.

Of course, certain ignorant people that didn't like his church's views probably thought that he was secretly gay. It had still taken Dave some time to become comfortable with the idea of leading groups on SSA, because it seemed obvious to him that people never led those things unless they struggled with it themselves. Makes sense. Can't lead any group on something unless you know about it yourself. But everyone in the church just took it for what it seemed to be--for what it really was--their pastor helping his congregation. And honestly, nowadays, with the whole gay pride thing going mainstream, some of his church members really needed help. He couldn’t hide away and refuse the calling.

That's what had him so scared for Shelby. If he were her, now, he didn't know if he could resist like he had when he'd been growing up.

—

The first time he knew he was in real trouble with what he later came to call same-sex attraction was back home, in G., Texas. At the time he'd just been terrified, beyond the point of being able to name or deal with any of the feelings that had come to a head that night with Jonathan.

It was crazy how it snuck up on him. Before “the incident,” he didn’t even really recognize what had been growing between them.

They were best friends, him and Jon. They had a lot in common, and Dave regarded his friendship with him as an anchor for him in those tumultuous times at home with his father. He'd crashed at Jon's place, no questions asked, more times than he could count.

Jon was lanky, taller than Dave but just as thin. The pair had suffered through an innumerable amount of jokes about David and Jonathan in the Bible, and that was when people hadn't mistaken them for brothers or twins (he never understood that one—their faces were nothing alike). Whenever Dave dared really reminisce, Jon's smirk and dark messy hair came to the front of his mind. That and the unspeakable coordination they'd shared from the sheer amount of hours spent together. They'd run all their miles for cross country, on and off-season, together. They walked and biked all over town, back and forth from school to each others’ houses; always in step, often silent and completely comfortable. Things had always felt okay with Jon, even when they had petty little disagreements.

Jon had thrown a modest but fun party at his house for Dave's 17th birthday. Nothing crazy or over the top, but definitely a party to remember. At some point, as they danced like goofballs and posed for a camera with their arms slung around each others' shoulders, Jon had turned his head and pressed a kiss into his hair. Dave hadn't been drunk (for lack of drinking, even then), but he wondered if the feeling he had, buzzing with contentment the whole night, was what being drunk or high might be like.

The kiss made his heart skip a beat but it didn't feel wrong. He beamed at Jon the next chance he got.

When everyone had gone, including Jon's girlfriend Jess, Jon gave Dave his gift, alone in Dave's room.

It was a flare gun he'd bought off some kid in school. Kind of a weird gift, he'd thought, as he opened it and saw what it was, but the warmth that had exploded in his chest the first time he and Jon shot flares off their bikes through town in the middle of the night...the feeling matched the heat of those burning signals, he was sure of it. The gun had instantly become precious to him. It was one of those experiences that crept back up on you every time you saw something like it. Dave couldn't gaze up at a dark night sky and watch fireworks without flashing back to those flares.

Looking back, he was oddly nostalgic for and disappointed in his memories of that time. At the time it had felt like the world's greatest friendship, like a bond that would never fade. Not something that had been crossing a line--which tainted their years of closeness in his mind, now, somewhat.

What happened even later that night was probably his only real secret of any consequence. He didn't give details of his own experience when he led SSA groups, and he'd never brought it up to JoBeth, a fact which had once had a recurring twinge of guilt connected to it. That guilt had since faded--it didn't hold any relevance to who he was now, he reasoned. Not even to who he was when he'd first met her. What would be the point of telling her now? And she'd never asked.

Dave gave his head a little shake unconsciously, attempting to clear his head from that particular topic. Away from the way Jon and he had shared a bed like they had several times before, bodies brushing repeatedly as they both tossed and turned over the course of the night. Away from the way they'd woken in the morning, and how, after a whole sequence of events that was somehow a blur _and_ clear as day, Jon's hand had palmed his length through his pajama pants, and how it'd felt totally natural and _good_ until Dave's mother had knocked moments later and told them it breakfast was ready. She hadn't even opened the door, but Dave had rarely ever felt pure panic come crashing down on him that way at any other time in his life, before or since. When he went downstairs into the full sun and felt the morning in full swing (they had miles to run, despite it being a Saturday), he felt like he was in another world compared to his half-lit, now-debauched bedroom.

—

Dave had to stop here. His friendship with Jon had actually survived that moment, though it felt like it had taken a long time for the both of them to "forget" the incident. They'd never actually uttered more than a dozen words about it between the two of them:

"I'm not like that--"

"That's not gonna happen again--" They'd started at the same time once they'd broken free of the house and were sufficiently far away from the scene of the crime for their hyper-vigilant minds. And that was that. But things had changed, closed off between them for a while.

He discovered how dangerous the temptation of same-sex attraction really was, then. Back then, he’d been an animal, unable to stop himself from touching himself again and again to thoughts of what that morning might have been like if they’d been alone, with all the time in the world…and when the guilt and disgust with himself had stopped him from revisiting that particular subject, his unconscious brought it back up in his dreams. Those months had been a special kind of torture.

And Dave almost dared say he'd grown out of the whole thing, but he knew that wasn't the whole truth. He was careful with how close he let certain guys get. He didn't let his eyes linger anywhere they weren't supposed to be, and sometimes he was tempted to let them run over another man's body, rather than the typical temptation that came from women. The difference was, now, he knew what he had to do to keep himself on the right path, like how he knew what he needed to keep himself in shape and healthy. Shelby didn't know any of that yet, and things were very different for her already. 

The whole thing with him and Jonathan stood in stark contrast to what had happened with Shelby and Rebecca. He'd walked in on them (Dave had always considered it a great mercy that his parents had not walked in on him and Jon). It had been obvious, and Becca hadn't survived the year (Jon and him had just grown apart after high school).

They'd never really know why she took her own life, but Dave quietly bet the whole ordeal from Shelby’s…incident had something to do with it. He had to blink back a few tears for what felt like the hundredth time. It was unsurprisingly difficult to even come to grips with a kid so close to Shelby passing, and every time he thought of her he thought of Shelby and protecting her from a similar fate.

And that was what pushed him to take more drastic action for Shelby's sake than he'd ever undergone himself. He had to get her away from all the turmoil and pain here and help her heal, in all the ways she needed it right now. He nodded to himself and locked his office back up, and finally went up to bed, ascending the dark staircase two at a time, determined to speak to JoBeth about his decision as soon as possible.

This couldn't wait 'til morning.

**Author's Note:**

> you heard it here first folks, dave goodkind is bi. this was kind of weird to write, but i couldn't let go of the idea and i have other things to write. so i just banged this out today.
> 
> just wanted to add a bit of a disclaimer here. what i wrote here is just an expansion of a headcanon i have of dave goodkind as a character. it's meant to be a companion to at least one fic i'm working on, but the way it came out, it kind of just works in any universe where shelby is put through conversion therapy of any kind by her parents.
> 
> he's not meant to be any kind of commentary on bi people or homophobes at large. not all(not even close lmao) homophobic people are gay, especially looking back before lgbt people were more accepted in the US in the past several years. and definitely not in communities that are still just like, homophobic as a default, like fundamentalist christianity!
> 
> if you actually read this (i don't expect many to click on a fic getting into the most unlikeable character's head), let me know your thoughts!


End file.
